Hello! Point me toward an existing post if this info is already out there someplace. We have been using Shopify for online sales since last April and will soon be switching from Microsoft RMS POS (we've had this since we opened 12 years ago) to Shopify POS. There are many tasks I assumed would be built in to the functionality of Shopify that will need to be handled with apps. I'm having trouble figuring out what I will need to just function as we currently do - and trying to budget for all the costs associated with extra apps. I have looked through the apps.shopify.com but having trouble sorting through just the basics.

We are a small store. Fewer than 2000 SKUs, one location and four total staff (including two owners). Any advice on the most useful basic apps I should look at? We are mainly focused on our in-store experience at this point.

Any advice appreciated! Especially from actual store owners in my position that are using the apps every day. Thank you.

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We had the same questions when we chose Shopify as our new POS. There are apps out there that do a lot of different things and it was a confusing landscape of choices to determine what we needed.

We relied on our sales team to point us to apps that might work for us. After spending three months learning and playing around with different apps, we decided to keep things pretty simple.

Not knowing your needs its tough to make a recommendation. If you shared some of the tasks that you are looking to find solutions for, that would be helpful.

For our store, we needed to be able to manage our inventory in multiple locations. In our current POS solution we have more than 10 locations between the warehouse, other random inventory locations that our retail team created and the actual stores. We consolidated them into five locations and are using collections to manage all the needs (many of the "locations" weren't really locations so collections made sense). We landed on Stocky to manage all of our purchasing/inventory control tasks.

We also need to be able to report on sales, COGS and other important metrics. Reporting has actually become a pretty big deal because in our current system, you can assign a GL code to a product - something that you cannot easily do in Shopify. We solved the issue (at least we think we have) using Better Reports. The Better Reports interface allowed for a way to create custom reports without having to change our Shopify plan to a plan that was more expensive.

If you share some of the tasks you are interested in finding solutions for, I'd be asking everyone you might be in contact with at Shopify about talking to a solutions engineer there. That, and just experimenting with the different apps that are available. The ones we looked at all had free trials that allowed us to try them and decide if what they did provided a solution to the need we had.

Thanks so much for your response! We are a small shop in just one location, in business for 12 years. We have four total staff, two of which are owners. Some basic things we have counted on with Microsoft RMS POS:

So based on your list of needs, I think Stock will satisfy most of them. Take a look below at my comments back to your list:

Creating purchase orders for products and sending these to vendors - Stocky will do this

Printing purchase orders - Stocky will do this

Receiving inventory and the ability to receive orders partially if entire shipment doesn't arrive - Stocky will do this

Creating price tag labels and printing them - We are looking at an app called Retail Bar Codes for this need

Changing prices/offering discounts on the fly - I think you can do this in the Shopify app

Tracking item movement - when a specific item has been ordered, received, purchased, returned - If you are looking into reporting for these things, I'd say look at a combination of Stocky and Better Reports. These are things we are still researching to see how we want to report on these things.

The ability to take returns as refund, store credit, or gift certificate - Shopify should support this

The ability to take items out of inventory if they are returned as damaged - Stocky does this

I would say start with Stocky for purchasing, receiving and forecasting. There are some things Stocky doesn't do as well as our current (about-to-be old) POS system Quickbooks POS. One is when receiving you can't see a running total of the quantities and dollar amounts received so you can't find discrepancies against the vendor's invoice. But all in all, Stocky does pretty well at the above which is probably why Shopify bought them. And for that reason, I'm confident it will keep improving though, I would like to be able to provide Shopify product team with feedback on desired functionality and/or see Stocky's roadmap. I guess I'll leave with we weren't confident enough to switch to Shopify POS until I found Stocky.

A “track my order” page and shipping status email notification will reduce around 80% emails of "where is my package". It will reduce your workload so much that you can focus on the really big things for your Shopify store.